Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  While these broad intertextual associations can help us to clarify a reading of Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon also associates his novel specifically with the works of British fantasy and science fiction author Michael Moorcock. He does this first by dedicating the novel to him. This is a clear exploitation of what literary critic Gérard Genette would describe as the paratext, a term that refers to everything from the color of the cover to the presence or absence of an afterword, all of which “surrounds” and “extends” any given text with a “zone not only of transition but of transaction” (1). The paratext, then, provides the reader with a series of clues as to exactly how a given book is to be read, and in this case Chabon indicates that Moorcock’s work is in some way relevant to a reading of Gentlemen of the Road. He provides a further intertextual clue by associating Zelikman with Moorcock’s best known character, Elric of Melniboné. So what we have here is a form of transaction between Chabon’s and Moorcock’s novels, a loan, as it were, of literary meaning from one text or set of texts to another. The association between the two works is certainly appropriate: Elric is the protagonist of a series of six novels published in the 1960s and 1970s that, while leaning much further toward fantasy than Gentlemen of the Road, nonetheless share many features of the quest form, and more importantly circulate around similar themes.

  Chabon’s intertextual association of Zelikman and Elric occurs through their similar physical appearances and habits. Zelikman is conspicuously fair, has a complexion as “white as tallow,” is notably thin—he is repeatedly described as a “scarecrow”—and sartorially penumbral, dressing “all in black” (Gentlemen 5–6, 45). These physical features are reiterated throughout the novel, and are emphasized by Gianni’s illustrations. Elric’s most pronounced physical feature is also his extreme pallor: as an albino his skin is “the colour of a bleached skull” (Elric 7). Elric is slender and “physically weak” without exotic drugs (or his magical, soul-drinking sword) to maintain his strength, and he, too, is partial to dressing somberly in a “black cloak” for peaceful occasions, or in “black gear” for battle (Stormbringer 280, Vanishing 60, Elric 31). The two characters are also linked by other less physical traits. Zelikman, descendent of Jewish scholars and doctors, is distinctly bookish. For instance, during the climax of Gentlemen of the Road, as the final bargain is struck with Zachariah, he is more interested in the “long shelf of folios and scrolls” in the kagan’s room than in the kagan himself, although he is “one of the three princes acknowledged as a peer by the Emperor of Byzantium,” and is clearly a man worth a second glance (Gentlemen 164–65). Elric has “read every book in his father’s library” by the age of fifteen (Elric 8). Furthermore, both Zelikman and Elric are prone to depression: the former is “prey to spells of black bile” while the latter is “often tortured by incommunicable self-loathing” (Gentlemen 32–33; Weird 312). And finally, like Elric, Zelikman is a drug addict, or at least user, relying on a mixture of “hemp seed and honey” to lighten his black moods (Gentlemen 31).

  These intertextual references are not, however, simply an act of homage from the lauded literary author to the critically neglected writer of genre fiction. Of course Chabon admires Moorcock (he has described him as “the greatest writer of post-Tolkien British fantasy,” a comment used as the cover blurb for recent reissues of the Elric novels) but the point, or at least effect, of such explicit and detailed intertextuality is to associate Zelikman, and the novel he appears in, with particular thematic elements of the Elric saga (“On Daemons” 60).[3]

  Most importantly, Zelikman and Elric share a similar attitude toward traditional authority and the bonds of the social world. The primary dramatic thrust of the Elric saga, at least in its earlier stages, involves an articulate repudiation of the stultifying weight of tradition. As the saga begins, Elric, though “four hundred and twenty-eighth in direct line of descent from the first Sorcerer Emperor of Melniboné,” has angered traditionalists by his “refusal to honor all the rituals” that have developed over the empire’s ten-thousand-year history (Elric 7, 5).[4] The primary focus of his rejection of tradition is the development of an introspective and individual mind that leads him “to question the uses to which power is put, to question his motives,” in short to the development of completely un-Melnibonéan “morality” reminiscent of Zelikman’s aversion to violence and collective activity (Elric 8). Elric’s unusual individuality eventually drives him to leave his kingdom, to, like Zelikman, “wander the world as an anonymous soldier of fortune” and learn what he can from the so-called “Young Kingdoms” for the good of Melniboné (Elric 39, 128). In a normal Campbellian quest narrative, Elric’s adventures in the larger world would culminate in a life-enhancing return to his home to rejuvenate his failing culture but, again like Zelikman, this is a step that Elric refuses to take: in fact, his eventual return to Melniboné takes place at the head of an army of raiders who utterly destroy it. This of course goes a long step further than Chabon does in Gentlemen of the Road, but if we think of Filaq’s overthrow of the traditional forms of Khazari government, of the kagan’s escape from his lethal position in society, and of Zelikman’s refusal to return home to offer filial respect to his aged father, a similar pattern of overt hostility to the ways that received social structures limit individual life experience is apparent. Chabon’s intertextual homage to Moorcock thus extends and deepens his assertion of the primacy of individual identity.

  Michael Chabon, American Novelist

  Gentlemen of the Road is in some ways an anomaly in Chabon’s oeuvre. While certainly comfortable operating in what he has described as the “borderlands” of fiction, he remains primarily an author of what he calls “late-century naturalism” (“Trickster” 12, Afterword 200). Even The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, for all that it is unquestionably a work of genre fiction, takes its literary cues from a more reputable source than Gentlemen of the Road: both Hammett and Chandler have been published by the Library of America, for example, while Robert E. Howard, for instance, has not received this sign of establishment recognition.[5] Yet the thematic elements of Gentlemen of the Road that I have attempted to highlight here are consistent with Chabon’s broader fictional project. In his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, for instance, the narrator-protagonist negotiates a new life free in the first instance of restrictive heteronormative definitions of sexuality, but more importantly unencumbered by his family’s defining connection to organized crime. In his most recent, Telegraph Avenue, the friendship between Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, and their joint enterprise Brokeland Records, offers a vision of how people might attempt to live not just as African Americans or Jews, but as individuals, who also happen to belong to a range of diverse and self-defining communities.

  Thus when D. G. Myers attacks Chabon for turning “his back on Jewish religion and the state of Israel,” for failing, in other words, to correspond to normative definitions of Jewishness, he is, however intolerantly, accurately taking the pulse of Chabon’s body of work, for the search for a less communally rigid identity lies at the center of his fiction, and it is this quest that Gentlemen of the Road dramatizes (588). And this is perhaps what most clearly locates Chabon as an American, rather than a Jewish or Jewish American author, for the great American dream, even if it may be all too often no more than just that, is the possibility of escape from historically and socially determined identities into the freedom of an individuality linked by no more than the bonds of friendship and love.

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Almond, Steve. “These ‘Gentlemen’ Are Swashbucklers, but Little Else.” Boston.com. Boston Globe. 17 Nov. 2007. Web. 27 Dec. 2012.

  Bloch, Ernst. “Better Castles in the Sky at the Country Fair and Circus, in Fairy Tales and Colportage.” The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. 167–85. Print.

  ———. “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel.” The Utopian Fun
ction of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. 245–64. Print.

  Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991.13–31. Print.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

  Casteel, Sarah Phillips. “Jews among the Indians: The Fantasy of Indigenization in Mordecai Richler’s and Michael Chabon’s Northern Narratives.” Contemporary Literature 50.4 (2009): 775–810. Project Muse. Web. 21 Dec. 2012.

  Chabon, Michael. Afterword. Gentlemen of the Road. 2007. New York: Del Rey, 2008. 197–204. Print.

  ———. “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes.” Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. New York: Harper, 2009. 23–45. Print.

  ———. Gentlemen of the Road. 2007. New York: Del Rey, 2008. Print.

  ———. “On Daemons & Dust.” Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. New York: Harper, 2009. 55–73. Print.

  ———. “Questions for Michael Chabon.” New York Times Magazine 8 Feb. 2007. Web. 31 Jan. 2013.

  ———. “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story.” Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands. New York: Harper, 2009. 1–14. Print.

  Crawford, Shawn. “No Time to Be Idle: The Serial Novel and Popular Imagination.” World & I 13.11 (1998): n. pag. Web. 31 Jan. 2013.

  Fiedler, Leslie. “Growing up Post-Jewish.” Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity. Boston: Godine, 1992. 117–22. Print.

  Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

  Geoghegan, Vincent. Ernst Bloch. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

  Hoberek, Andrew. “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion.” American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 483–99. Oxford Journals. Web. 28 Sept. 2012.

  ———. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.” Twentieth Century Literature 53.3 (2007): 233–47. JSTOR. Web. 28 Sept. 2012.

  Irwin, William. “Against Intertextuality.” Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 227–42. Project Muse. Web. 12 May 2011.

  Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. 50th anniv. ed. San Diego: Harvest, 1995. Print.

  Le Guin, Ursula K. “Preface to the 1989 Edition.” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood and Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Harper, 1989. 1–5. Print.

  Moorcock, Michael. “Elric of Melniboné.” The Elric Saga: Part I. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. 1–132. Print.

  ———. “Epic Pooh.” Revolution Science Fiction. n.p. n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2013.

  ———. “Stormbringer.” The Elric Saga: Part II. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. 270–471. Print.

  ———. “The Vanishing Tower.” The Elric Saga: Part II. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. 1–137. Print.

  ———. “The Weird of the White Woolf.” The Elric Saga: Part I. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. 260–374. Print.

  Myers, D. G. “Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews.” Sewanee Review 116.4 (2008): 572–88. Project Muse. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.

  Nazaryan, Alexander. “Michael Chabon’s Heavy-Handed Gentlemen of the Road.” Village Voice. 23 Oct. 2007. Web. 25 Sept. 2012.

  Royal, Derek Parker. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” Melus 32.3 (2007): 7–22. JSTOR. Web. 28 Sept. 2012.

  ———. “Introduction. Unfinalized Moments.” Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2011. 1–13. Print.

  Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 503–31. Project Muse. Web. 2 Feb. 2013.

  Wisse, Ruth R. The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture. 2000. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

  1. It is interesting, if disheartening, to note that recent steps toward the recognition of genre fiction as a valid form of literary expression follow on the arguably belated employment of genre models by male literary authors, including Chabon, while the earlier genre work of female literary authors remains relatively neglected.

  2. Chabon seems to be caught here on the uncomfortable prongs of an insoluble critical dilemma: if he grants his Jews the humanity Nazaryan demands for them, he is according to Myers denying them their Jewishness, and vice versa.

  3. This is a somewhat unusual compliment to offer a writer who has described Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as “Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic” (Moorcock, “Epic Pooh”).

  4. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy also presents an ancient kingdom hopelessly encumbered by senseless rituals inimical to individual identity; it seems that Tolkien’s nostalgic, elegiac portrayal of a vanishing traditional past is counterbalanced in British fantasy by this sort of antiestablishment sentiment.

  5. Nor is he likely to do so, given his egregious sexual and racial politics and the dubious quality of his writing. The point is that swashbuckling adventure has not, unlike other similarly low-status genres, achieved even a modicum of social respectability. However, the recent success of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series may change this.

  Chapter 11

  Solving the Jewish Case

  Inbar Kaminsky

  Metaphorical Detection in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

  Michael Chabon’s use of the detective genre can be perceived as a unique commentary on Jewish identity, as his two designated detectives—the old man in The Final Solution and Detective Meyer Landsman in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—attempt to solve more than just the case they have been assigned, as Jewish themes of exile, anti-Semitism, and assimilation loom in the background. While The Final Solution casts the classic detective genre within the framework of a Holocaust narrative, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a mix of alternative history and the hard-boiled detective genre.

  In fact, the unique generic hybridity of both texts toys with the reader’s expectations and sets the stage for a narrative interpretation that focuses on the symbolic meaning of various generic subversions and the metaphorical value that Chabon assigns to his protagonists. In this chapter I intend to explore how the generic subversions of the classic and hard-boiled detective story help to explore the implicit roles of the protagonists and their analogy to the plots of The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in relation to Jewish identity.

  A Bird’s-Eye View: The Final Solution

  The subversion of the classic detective genre conventions is obvious in The Final Solution; pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe and adopted by Arthur Conan Doyle, this particular genre enables Chabon to create an extraordinary statement about Jewish voice and memory. The first generic subversion is evident upon the discovery that the old man, presumed to be the retired Sherlock Holmes, is experiencing the first stages of dementia and therefore cannot fully function as the rational detective. Exclusively referred to as “the old man” throughout the novel, the detective’s cognitive faculties betray him in moments of blackout as “meaning drained from the world like light fleeing the operation of an eclipse . . . the world around him was a page of alien text” (Final 84). It is clear that the old man’s instincts are not as sharp as they once were, and that he is painfully aware of that fact, often lamenting the loss of his keen skills:

  Between the epic of the bees and the rasp of his own respiration within the tent of his protective netting, he failed to hear, as he had failed to anticipate the long black saloon car that turned up the day after his interview with Parkins. . . . Easy prey, he thought, disgusted with himself. Fortunate, really, that all one’s enemies are dead. (Final 64)

  The title of the novella is in itself a mas
h-up of appropriations—a Sherlock Holmes classic detective tale meets the ominous Nazi Project:

  The novel’s title, The Final Solution, exemplifies the generic hybridity of Chabon’s text: “final solution” refers literally to the solving of an aged detective’s last investigation (in addition to referencing Sherlock Holmes by antithetically inviting comparison to “The Final Problem,” one of the Holmes stories). The phrase also invokes the Holocaust and alerts the reader to this presence: Chabon uses the Nazi system’s euphemistic appropriation of language to lend an ironic double meaning to the title of his fictional narrative. (Richardson 163)